The Evolution of Imagination

By Stephen T. Asma

“An ambitious and exciting book about creativity . . . chart[s] new territory.” —Science

Consider Miles Davis, horn held high, sculpting a powerful musical statement full of tonal patterns, inside jokes, and thrilling climactic phrases—all on the fly. Or a comedy troupe riffing on cues from the audience until the whole room erupts with laughter; a team of software engineers brainstorming their way to the next Google; or the Einsteins of the world code-cracking the mysteries of nature. Maybe it’s simply a child playing with her toys. What do all of these activities share? With wisdom, humor, and joy, philosopher Stephen T. Asma answers that question: imagination. And from there he takes us on an extraordinary tour of the human creative spirit.

Guided by neuroscience, animal behavior, evolution, philosophy, and psychology, Asma burrows deep into the human psyche to look at the enigmatic, powerful engine that is our improvisational creativity—the source, he argues, of our remarkable imaginational capacity. How, he asks, can a story evoke a whole world inside us? How are we able to rehearse a skill, a speech, or even an entire scenario simply by thinking about it? How does creativity go beyond experience and help us make something completely new? And how does our moral imagination help us sculpt a better society?

As he shows, we live in a world that is only partly happening in reality. Huge swaths of our cognitive experiences are made up by “what-ifs,” “almosts,” and “maybes,” an imagined terrain that churns out one of the most overlooked but necessary resources for our flourishing: possibilities. Considering everything from how imagination works in our physical bodies to the ways we make images, from the mechanics of language and our ability to tell stories to the creative composition of self-consciousness, Asma expands our personal and day-to-day forms of imagination into a grand scale: as one of the decisive evolutionary forces that has guided human development from the Paleolithic era to today. The result is an inspiring look at the rich relationships among improvisation, imagination, and culture, and a privileged glimpse into the unique nature of our evolved minds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9780226225333

Book preview

The Evolution of Imagination

The Evolution of Imagination

Stephen T. Asma

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by Stephen T. Asma

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-22516-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-22533-3 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226225333.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Asma, Stephen T., author.

Title: The evolution of imagination / Stephen T. Asma.

Description: Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016056665| ISBN 9780226225166 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226225333 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Creative ability. | Imagination.

Classification: LCC BF408 .A83 2017 | DDC 153.3—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056665

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Julien

Contents

Introduction

ONE : The Second Universe

Counting Off

Some Crucial Ingredients

The Captain or the Muse?

Metaphysical Imagination

A Second Universe

Philosophical Missteps

You Are an Expert Improviser

TWO : The Creative Body

Give the Drummer Some

Thinking with Your Body

The Simulation System

Hot Cognition and Heuristics

I Feel, Therefore I Improvise

The Most Playful Ape

The Caveman Thespian

Emotional Intelligence and Improvisation

THREE : Drawing, Dreaming, and Visual Improvisation

The Roots and the Walking Bass

Caveman Picassos

Images, Dreams, and Proto-Consciousness

Pictorial Mind and Creative Thinking

Voluntary Imagination

FOUR : Spinning the Yarn: Creating with Language

Playing the Head

How Did Language Evolve?

Storytelling Apes

Take It to the Bridge! Improvisation as Helpful Deviance

Tuning a Theory

FIVE : Blowing Away the Self: Creativity and Control

Solo Time

Evolution of the First-Person Perspective

Where Is the Self?

Zen, Flow, and Brain Systems

Finding Your Way Back

SIX : The Politics of Imagination: Trading Fours

The Cultures of Creating and Copying

Ethics and the Moral Imagination

Improvisation, Dogmatism, and the Future of Freedom

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

Consider Miles Davis stepping up to the microphone and sculpting a powerful musical statement—complete with furtive tonal secrets, inside jokes, and blasting climactic summits—all composed in real time over a hard-swinging rhythm section. Now consider a hip-hop freestyle rapper performing an unrehearsed verse, and each word takes him dangerously closer to the inevitable closing rhyme—his options for a coherent finish dwindle even while he builds his final sentence. Or consider a comedy improv team—like The Second City—taking a few cues from an audience and collectively riffing it into a coherent story punctuated by belly laughs and irony. Now envision a team of digital engineers doing some outside the box brainstorming, as they work to invent a new app. Or slow it down and we find the Darwins and Einsteins of science testing and trying fresh theoretical solutions to the nagging mysteries of nature.

The shared element in these diverse activities is the enigmatic engine of human creativity, the improvising imagination. Human culture itself is impossible without the imagination, and yet we know very little about it. Why does a story evoke a whole world inside us? How are we able to rehearse a skill or an event in our mind’s eye? How does creativity go beyond experience to make something altogether new? And how does the moral imagination help us improvise our way toward a more ethical society?

I.1. Trumpet player Miles Davis (1926–1991) is considered one of the great improvisers of several jazz traditions, including cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz fusion.

Artists often consider the imagination their unique provenance, but the imagination drives everything from engineering, marketing, cosmology, economics, and ethics. Aristotle described the imagination as a faculty in humans (and most other animals) that produces, stores, and recalls the images used in a variety of cognitive and volitional activities. Even our sleep is energized by the dreams of our involuntary imagination. Immanuel Kant saw the imagination as a synthesizer of sensibility and understanding. Freud saw it as a release system for antisocial desires. And recent neuroimaging reveals that a prefrontal and temporal lobe circuit enables us to project ourselves into different times and places—the imagination is our inner time-traveler.

We live in a world that is only partly happening. We also live in co-present simultaneous worlds made up of almosts or what ifs and maybes. At the moment that I’m failing at some task, for example, I’m simultaneously running a success scenario of my actions, and this imaginary reality is creating real emotions inside me. Or I see this open grassy field here, but also see (through imagination) my future home that will be built on this empty plot. Imagination is the possibility maker. It is the home of hope and regret.

What is the relationship between improvisation and imagination? The issue is fraught with ambiguity. The philosophical and the artistic traditions have considered the imagination as a mental faculty that mediates between the particulars of the senses (e.g., luminous blue colors) and the universals of our conceptual understanding (e.g., the judgment that Marc Chagall’s blue America Windows is beautiful or sunrises are beautiful). Philosophers (from Aristotle through Kant, and beyond) have focused on the unique forms of judgment that arise from imagination. But I will argue (respectfully) that this tradition over-intellectualizes the imagination.

I.2. Hip-hop artists often battle each other with freestyle rap techniques. The artists take turns delivering spoken poetry that has not been rehearsed, and often incorporate spontaneous commentary on the opponent’s appearance and skill level (not to mention the dubious character of their respective mothers).

The philosophers characterize imagination as a kind of cognition rather than embodied action. This common mistake demotes the imagination to a kind of weak knowledge—making it derivative or secondary to real knowledge. From Aristotle to the present, philosophers and scientists have tended to think of real knowledge as a process of seeing through the particular cases to the universal rules or laws that govern them. This search for formal properties ignores sensual particulars in favor of conceptual universals. For example, we see that this man has a snub nose, this other man is bald, this man is young, this one old, this one hungry, this one tall, et cetera, but eventually we see past all this to recognize their shared defining features: they are all rational, featherless bipeds. The common defining features are the real objects of knowledge, according to this long-standing tradition.

Against this universalizing approach, the imagination stays close to particular sensual impressions—the snub nose and the baldness of the men are more relevant (e.g., the hunchback is not subtractable from Quasimodo of Notre-Dame). Often the imagination adds many traits rather than subtracting them, as in the case of flying pigs, talking animals, and composite hybrid creatures like mermaids, griffins, and even gods like the Hindu Ganesh. The imagination is interested in the particular. If imagination captures a universal—and it frequently does—it is emotional rather than conceptual, as when a theatrical tragedy (rich with particular detail) captures a universal aspect of grief or love.

I will draw upon the philosophers when their ideas about the imagination are relevant, but my interests are closer to the common layperson’s use of imagination as a creative power. Creativity must be broadly understood as an intellectual, artistic, and even bodily form of investigation and expression.

Improvisation, in my account, will be the main activity, method, or operation of the imaginative faculty. Improvisation, more accurately, is not just what the imagination does, but is the adaptive meeting place between the organism and the environment. The improvising imagination draws on internal resources (i.e., thoughts, feelings, behaviors) and environmental resources (i.e., this tool, this pigment, this rock) in service of various end goals. As we will learn, the rapid activity of real-time problem solving is where improvisation shines, but a common cognitive architecture underlies the slower, cool-headed forms of imaginative planning as well. Improvising a can opener and designing one take place in two different timescales, but both processes draw on similar mind-body equipment.

It is rare for imagination to engage in free-play synthesis with no purpose whatsoever. We like to think of imaginative improvisation as completely unfettered, but it rarely is. And if it were, it would be more like uninteresting noise. As spontaneous creativity inevitably becomes more bounded by specific goals (e.g., technology, procreation, play, catharsis, prediction), it comes under greater executive control. My team riffs and brainstorms ideas, for example, but those riffs are channeled toward the different goals depending on whether my team is a corporate group, a scientific research team, a TV drama’s writers, or a baseball team. We break improvisation into conventional taxonomies or headings, like humanities or fine arts or sciences, but the mechanics or processes of the underlying creativity share many common features.

The activity of improvising furnishes us with a fresh model for grasping how the imagination works, and one that does not fall victim to the overly intellectual approach. The intellectual or overly cognitive approach to the mind considers thinking as a kind of internal talking. The inner conversation of our thought is bound by language structures and functions—our thinking is a rapid blather of propositions. According to this dominant cognitivist view, imagining and other forms of thinking are ways of bringing together representations (like memories and concepts) into novel combinations, governed by linguistic grammar. But I will argue that the imagination is not information processing. The binary logic of computation, so effective in artificial intelligence (AI), is the wrong starting place for understanding the imagination. It’s not wrong because we should all be mysterians about the mind and ascribe to it supernatural miraculous powers. It’s wrong because an algorithmic approach fails to grasp the emotional and bodily basis of imagination.

We should think of imagining—the verb form, rather than imagination as a mental faculty. In this way we’ll see greater connection between improvisation and imagination. Ultimately, however, these relatively unconscious processes have been hidden from any direct examination and only glimpsed obliquely or inferred from their finished creative products.

Thinking of the imagination as a process is more consistent with brain science as well. There is no imagination organ buried in the neuroanatomical structures of the brain. Several candidates for location have come and gone, most popular of which is the idea that the right hemisphere houses imagination. But data suggest no clear localization of creativity, and the most that can be said with confidence is that communication between brain regions is very high in imaginative people. The brain activity during the creative process is widely scattered, and we will learn that imaginative improvisation draws on many systems (e.g., motor, imagery, language, emotions, etc.).

Using other philosophical traditions (e.g., phenomenology, pragmatism, biosemantics, etc.) and recent scientific research (e.g., Ap Dijksterhuis’s Unconscious Lab, affective neuroscience, etc.), I will argue that improvisation (spontaneous creation) is the fundamental process that underlies downstream achievements of both scientific and artistic imagination. Moreover, the improvising imagination has more access to knowledge (more epistemic power) than most modern philosophers, scientists, and even artists have been willing to consider.

We are always engaged in mental improv, but the stakes seem low because most of us are not doing it onstage in front of an audience. And while high-risk, onstage improvisation brings unique emotional and cognitive ingredients, we are all in dangerous territory whenever we strike out toward new intellectual and social terrain. The danger is, of course, also the attraction. Playing a jazz solo or a cadenza seems like high-stakes improvisation, but try parenting, marrying, soldiering, or feeling your way around a new religion. Real life is also high-stakes improvisation.

In this book, I will take care to explore archetypical cases of human improvisation—general intelligence processes that probably came online before the Upper Paleolithic (before 50,000 years ago), but remain with us today in culturally transformed processes, including music, social interaction, storytelling, religion, and technology. These examples will help to clarify the complex relationships between improvisation and imagination, and hopefully give us a privileged glimpse into the unique nature of our evolved primate minds.¹

The improvising imagination is one of the little-explored phenomena that uniquely unify the humanities and biology. In it, we find the creativity that first emerged in our adaptive innovations (e.g., technological and social advancements), our involuntary free-play compositions of dreaming, our adaptive mythologies, and our highest human artistic achievements.

It is common for some evolutionary psychologists to reduce the mind to a set of computations (domain-specific problem-solving circuits) and project them into the Pleistocene era. Our mind, according to this modular approach, is a series of specific circuits or modules that evolved to solve specific problems—for example, avoiding poisonous plants is a mind circuit, detecting people who cheat is a mind circuit, finding a fertile mate is a mind circuit, and so on. However, this view of highly specialized circuits is heavily contested. Our improvising skills and our imaginative powers, for example, almost certainly grow out of general intelligence capabilities, not specific modules. Indeed, our improvising mind is the very opposite of a hardwired module or circuit, because it cannot be dedicated to one or two functions and seems available to all manner of problem-solving experiments. Improvisation is the anti-module. I will articulate sensible scenarios of early adaptive imagination, as corroborated in comparative primate studies, anthropology, childhood developmental psychology, and social psychology. But I will also give great weight to the unique semantics of culture and the humanities proper, all the while keeping track of the cognitive, social, and emotional prerequisites that evolved to get us here today.

Humanities scholars have long argued that imagination allows us to enter the life and mind of another person or people, giving us the realization of common humanity, moral understanding, and tolerance.² Our improvisations as a virtual other self require cognitive structures for projecting identity and difference, as well as emotional systems undergirding care and empathy. Philosophy will help articulate these faculties and functions. Moreover, beyond any evolutionary justification, aesthetics (as an autonomous discipline) reveals which kinds of stories work well or badly, which kinds of images and melodies move us or fail, and what makes an improvisation beautiful, ugly, or sublime. My approach will be pluralist, not reductionist. As a philosopher, part of my job is conceptual engineering—informed by the latest evolutionary science. Tracking the evolution of improvisation requires me to reverse-engineer a contemporary skill into its ancestral parts and capacities. But I will try to validate these findings with evidence from the life sciences and the humanities, and my claim is that many of these ancestral capacities are still available in our contemporary creative activities.

Books about creativity have tended to fall into one of three genres. On the one hand, there have been the breathless and overreaching feel-good paeans to famous entrepreneurs and successful CEO creatives. This kind of book is crammed with amusing but shallow factoids and over-interpreted fMRI studies, all wrapped in a vaguely inspirational glaze. Next, we have the how-to books that give artists a series of exercises to unblock their creative flow. These books are either therapeutic or instructive, or both, and seek to nurture the joy of our inner prodigy. The third genre is the impenetrable academic baffler, chock-full of erudite and cryptic references to Foucault and the hegemonic phallocentric horizon of being, but otherwise devoid of illumination.

This book, by contrast, will be a broadly philosophical exploration of the origins and meanings of human improvisation and creativity. Fans of those other books will hopefully find much of interest here too, but this project is more foundational.

So, what is new and possibly groundbreaking in this book? Perhaps the most unique aspect is that I am reversing the traditional order of things, both logically and chronologically. Improvising did not emerge recently as some rarified elite employment of otherwise pedestrian symbols and behaviors. It was, instead, the driving force in our natural history. Our ancestors’ forms of communication were prelinguistic, embodied gestural modes that served social needs. These mimicry forms of communication presumably emerged from affective/emotional adaptations that were long under construction in mammals. Grooming, body language, motherese, gesture, play, and other learned nonlinguistic communication preceded the cognitive revolution that language instigated. But contemporary cognitive science and evolutionary psychology have failed to take the primate social niche, and even the body, seriously.³

I will be arguing that the manipulation (improvisation) of information-rich perceptions/memories/image schemas/bodily gestures is born out of our primate social, emotional needs. Our intellect is a product and servant of our social life, and the improvising imagination—our early intellect—gave us the behavioral/mental scaffolding to organize and manage our experience long before words and concepts. The improvising imagination typifies the flexibility of human mind, but the dates and the proximate triggers of such flexibility remain somewhat obscured in prehistory.

Following anthropologist Steven Mithen, I argue that a crucial feature of Homo sapiens’ mind is cognitive fluidity.⁴ This fluidity breaks down the dedicated brain circuitry that ties one action response to one stimulus. Our minds become less machine-like because we can entertain counterfactual images and enlist alternative responses. Most evolutionary psychologists claim that the cause of this cognitive fluidity was the development of language (in the late Pleistocene), because language provides an obvious syntactical/grammatical system for manipulating representations. This system seemed to be the perfect girder network for expanding the inner head space of flexible cognition. But more recently, Mithen has argued that another system—namely, music—coevolved in parallel with language and gave pre-sapiens similar ways of projecting possible futures.

My argument takes this insight one step further, suggesting that, more than just music per se, a suite of creative abilities—dance, image, music, gesture, et cetera, which are more proximate to the body than language—built an inner space and behavioral space of options that freed Homo from the more deterministic patterns of other hominids. These creative improvisation skills emerged from earlier mammalian habits that manage resource exploitation and social cohesion, and they were emotionally (affectively) driven (i.e., habits like grooming and play fighting). Play, for example, would be selected for because it allows mammals to take threats (and dominance) off-line and rehearse for them in safe environments. And such proto-imagination play is done largely through the body, without much cognitive motivation or even understanding. From such lowly origins, a discernible thread can be traced all the way to Einstein’s reputed claim that play is the highest form of research.⁵

Some scholars have pursued the embodied metaphorical structures within language itself, and their work is important evidence that meaning is rooted in the body (not the head).⁶ But I am more interested in exploring the evolutionary period before explicit language, as well as our contemporary access to that prelinguistic mode of meaning. I’m trying to explore the phase of mind above purely behaviorist stimulus-and-response, but below linguistic metaphors and propositional meaning. This historical moment (probably initiated during the early Pleistocene, circa 2 million years ago) is replicated or recapitulated, I believe, in the processes of our contemporary improvisational activities. The improvising musician, dancer, athlete, or engineer is drawing directly on the prelinguistic reservoir or meaningful communication. A music improviser or even a backpacker traveling in an exotic land without knowing the local language has to tap into that ancient call-and-response logic of body language and emotional expression in order to navigate properly. We try this move and watch for a response, try that move and watch. We dodge and parry this incoming gesture, accept that one. Flying by the seat of our pants, in these cases, is not just some analogy to prelinguistic communication—it is the thing itself.

This may well be the most controversial aspect of the book—that we might all have regular access to the ancestral mind. My thesis is that we have some direct access, albeit murky, to prelinguistic Homo intelligence, and this subjective experience can be intersected with the scientific methodologies of anthropology and evolutionary psychology. My job will be to expose the reader to some of this fascinating new research in the human sciences and reveal the connections with our own imaginative experiences. Trying to infer whether Neanderthals were cognitively modern from evidence of their ancient funerals is a worthy research program, but I want to augment such approaches with a systematic introspection of our own nonlinguistic consciousness. There is nothing spooky or mystical about this approach. I will be trying to articulate the dynamics of our embodied improvisational activities.

My approach is part of a growing research movement that seeks to ground meaning (biosemantics) in the embodied interaction of social primates. As great apes, we humans almost certainly engaged in the kind of subtle, antiphonal, body-language communication that we see throughout all social primates. Primate psychologists, like Louise Barrett, for example, are starting to track the malleable interaction networks that build up slowly in the course of development, giving primates the proximate lexicon of signifying gestures that will ultimately serve the bigger functions of dominance and submission, mating, alliance, food sharing, provisioning, and so on.⁷ My argument is that we, too, operate in these embodied gestural systems of meaning much more than we usually acknowledge. The reigning paradigm in both the humanities and the sciences is that meaning is linguistically grounded—propositional, inferential, and largely indicative. My argument is that this level of meaning rides on top of a deeper and older level—bodily, associational, and largely imperative (normative).

Art making is a realm that actually demonstrates these deeper lexicons of social communication. Jazz is a great case study of this realm of meaning, but it is just a token of a capacious type of adaptive human mind. Collective art making, especially in real time, manifests call-and-response meaning, but even solitary imaginative improvisation (the painter or writer) internalizes the social interaction within the practitioner.⁸ In some cases, the improviser is talking to herself (generalizing a social other) as she composes an artwork—and while such work is more linguistic (propositional and representational), many art-making scenarios entail an inner conversation that is much more image based, impressionistic, embodied, and even liminally unconscious.

Call-and-response is one of the oldest improvisational techniques, as is synchronization of our melodies and our body movements (like in dance). These are ancient procedures for cementing communities, captured in performances that express emotion and draw out emotion. Such techniques allow us to explore open-ended options at the fringes of social and technological rules. Eventually such socially constrained exploration evolves into more and more off-line experimentation, growing into forms of thinking with images, with sounds, with gestures.

Our primate cousins have impressive abilities (grounded in the cerebellum) for sequencing motor activities—they have a kind of grammar for processing inedible plants into edible food, for example. This is a level of problem solving that seeks order (and banks successes and failures) between the body and the ecological potentials. I will argue that this kind of motor sequencing is the first level of improvisational grammar. Following this foundation, another level of image-schema manipulation—like mental rotation and eventually image narrative—piggybacks upon body grammar. And finally, only much later, did we start thinking with linguistic symbols.

Computational theories of mind may resonate with our late Pleistocene linguistic thinking, but not with our earlier image cognition. We encode and manipulate image schema and gestural schema, and thereby form the basis of subsequent metaphorical meaning. I suspect that it is this thinking with images, sounds, and gestures that kicks off the cognitive fluidity marking our psychological modernity. As Eric Kandel puts it in his Age of Insight, Perhaps in human evolution the ability to express ourselves in art—in pictorial language—preceded the ability to express ourselves in spoken language. As a corollary, perhaps the processes in the brain that are important for art were once universal but were replaced as the universal capability for language evolved.⁹ I submit that the pictorial and gestural languages are still with us, and when we quiet our discursive consciousness long enough—like in improvisational activities—we can still converse in these more ancient tongues.

Besides the biophilosophy approach, this book draws upon my learning in both Western and Eastern wisdom traditions, and promises to be a cross-cultural investigation. I have had the good fortune to live, study, and teach in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and China. I have significant experience in the Western educational paradigm that treasures innovation and imagination, as well as a Chinese paradigm that prizes structure and mastery of time-worn rules and precedents. These contrasting civilizations are in a contemporary conversation about the value of the improvising imagination for future education. So, in addition to the evolutionary origins, we will also look at the possible future of improvisation as an engine of cultural success.

I’ve taught creative young people at a fine and performing arts college for twenty years, and I’ve researched creativity for decades and road-tested ideas in my classrooms. But more importantly, I’ve been a professional jazz/blues musician for twenty-five years, having the privilege of playing all around the country with some of my heroes—including Bo Diddley, Buddy Guy, Koko Taylor, B.B. King, and countless other great musicians. I’ve also worked as a professional illustrator, designing books, magazine articles, and websites. These experiences give me an insider’s perspective on improvisation and help guide my exploration of both the inspiration and craft of creativity.

I’ve chosen to weave the entire book with the story of a specific jazz performance. The quintessential American form of improvisation, jazz, is a perfect paradigm—organized, flexible, adaptive, emotional, logical, and occasionally chaotic. The Evolution of Imagination is a jam session in six chapters. But don’t worry if your jazz or musical vocabulary is not up to speed. I’m more concerned with the dynamics below the surface of any one example of improv. The jazz description will focus more on the social experimentalism of group performance and not music theory per se. Most of what we’ll find at work in a swinging jazz combo can just as easily be found in a pickup basketball game, product development team meeting, political diplomacy session, or tribal hunting party.

Each chapter will trade between two dominant melody lines: our real-time, in-the-moment uses of improvisation, and the origin and evolution of those imaginative powers. It will be an ontogenetic (individual development) and phylogenetic (species development) concert. How do we meaningfully dance today, for example, and how did the practice evolve in the first place? How do we use storytelling today, for example, and how did storytelling itself originate? How do I improvise in my daily life today, and how did improvisational thinking itself evolve in our ancestors?

I asked, ‘Do you have an electric dermatome?’ she recounted, hoping to use the surgical instrument commonly used in the United States to produce uniformly thin slices of skin for grafting. They said, ‘Yes,’ and handed me a 12-inch-long knife.

Doctors Without Borders surgeon Sherry Wren, improvising while treating an emergency patient in Chad, Africa

What we did . . . you couldn’t ever write down for an orchestra to play. That’s why I didn’t write it all out, not because I didn’t know what I wanted; I knew that what I wanted would come out of a process and not some prearranged shit. The session was about improvisation, and that’s what makes jazz so fabulous. Anytime the weather changes it’s going to change your whole attitude about something, and so a musician will play differently. . . . A musician’s attitude is the music he plays.

Miles Davis

: ONE :

The Second Universe

Counting Off

The upright bass player asks the pianist for an E. The note rings out amidst the clinking highball glasses and the audience murmurs. He winds his tuning peg slowly to find where the pitch warble unifies into an even tone. The tenor sax player wants to hear a C note, honks briefly, and then adjusts his mouthpiece until the note trues. The drummer downs a shot of whiskey and throws the lever on his snare drum. He feels the weight of the sticks in his hands and considers switching to brushes instead. He decides to wait, wondering what the first tune will be, hoping it’ll be an up-tempo song and not a ballad.

The pianist rolls up his sleeves and cycles through some minor chords, realizing the middle octave F# key is sharp. He winces and resolves to work with it anyway. No choice. Meanwhile the guitar player adjusts his amplifier, tweaking the treble dial and checking it against the idiosyncratic acoustics of the room.

The musicians are working through an ancient ritual of collective music making, adjusting their specific instruments and getting them in harmony with the others. Also, they are readying their bodies: limbering the right muscles, stretching the tension out of some, and tightening others, cracking knuckles, clearing throats, and tuning their eyes and ears to each other and the room of spectators. In short, the human imagination is slowly assembling its ingredients before improvisational combustion.

The piano player waves his hand and everybody leans in.

Let’s play the old Van Heusen tune ‘Imagination.’ Heads nod; the tenor player smiles. But don’t play it like the Ella ballad. Let’s speed up and swing it—

Wait, the bassist interjects. I don’t think I know the bridge on that one.

Don’t worry, the guitar player says. Just follow me—you’ll get it.

One, and two, and three, and . . .

: : :

We’re off. Something as simple as a count-off is deeply complex when we consider the cognitive and even bodily anticipation required to communicate and then create a melody and rhythm. The musician creates a one-measure virtual reality of what’s coming, and everyone has to feel it together to embark on the real-world version that audiences can enjoy. The count-off is an imaginative act that produces the future—it starts actualizing one groove from the myriad potential interpretations of the jazz standard Imagination. The ability to get ready, set, go is unique to higher animals. It allows us to prepare and create what’s coming next, rather than just responding to stimuli.

Predators excel at the metaphorical count-off because it helps them anticipate and catch what’s coming or going. Long before the count-off was a mental preparation, it was a bodily preparation—getting our muscles and limbs ready, our heart racing, our game face on. The earliest form of imagination, in the embodied mind, is anticipation.

Now imagine you’re on a Pleistocene hunting foray with your little band of Homo erectus tribesmen. Anticipation is crucial. The ability to throw a projectile and hit a moving target is an astounding piece of adaptive calculation—a crude first step of imaginative prediction. Throwing a projectile requires anatomical evolution (expansion of the waist, and a more twistable humerus) but also new cognitive/perceptual skills. The hunter needs to simulate internally what the prey animal might do next. Other non-human animals make such predictions, but they do not hunt with well-aimed projectiles. And perhaps most importantly, all this cooperative action and predictive skill requires some kind of apprenticeship. My readiness potential has to be directed and educated. Our ancestors survived because an early imaginative culture helped improvise and transmit cooperative hunting and gathering.

Did the hunting party improvise their way to dinner by conceptually modeling the environment and drawing logical inferences about where the wildebeest or buffalo will be next? If so, they would have needed mental concepts and inferential logic to manipulate them. Or did they feel their way to each successive move by some simpler experiential technique—following a bodily rehearsed series of motor sequences? These sorts of questions will become paramount as we track the capacity for improvisation. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We first need to consider some fundamental properties of the improvising imagination.

Some Crucial Ingredients

Improvisation is found in so many varied activities that it is difficult to isolate the essential or defining characteristics. We often know it, when we see it, but strict definitions rule out some good candidate activities. Too narrow a focus on MacGyver- or Rube Goldberg–type engineering may rule out certain features of musical improvisation, and vice versa. But if the definition is too broad, then everything becomes improvisation and we don’t gain insight into the crucial elements. At the risk of missing certain contours of the phenomenon, I’ll propose some key features of improvisation—with the Wittgensteinian caveat that such practices have a family resemblance to each other rather than a definite dictionary agreement. Many of these key features are so intimately related to one another, they cannot be entirely teased apart.

Spontaneity is a key feature. Improvisers are seemingly artless and natural, generating their work from within themselves. There is a notable freedom of process that produces novel responses to a situation in real time. Planning may be an implicit phase, but not particularly overt. Without spontaneity, the moves become predictable and the activity is rote rather than dynamic. In art, a lack of spontaneity creates artworks that are stilted and mannered. Similarly, in social interaction, spontaneity saves us from overly scripted communication and robotic body language. Relaxing our expectations about formal rules of engagement often allows for a more authentic unrehearsed expression of feeling and a more receptive read of others’ expressions.

Intuitive. The meaning of intuition is arguable, of course. The history of modern philosophy and theology has tended to contrast intuitive experience or intuitive knowledge as that which does not first enter through the five senses (the gateways of empirical knowledge). For that reason, it is sometimes characterized poetically as a sixth sense, as it delivers a knowledge state inside the subject without the usual perceptual mediation. But this view, favored by mystics of all stripes, can be contrasted with a more mundane (and scientific) approach to intuition. This more naturalistic use of intuitive describes the very subtle systems of animal awareness, mostly unconscious, that we all possess, such as body-position awareness (proprioception), personal space (proxemics), and arousal states that trigger instincts like fight or flight. They are physiological responses to environment, rooted in the central and peripheral nervous systems. Improvisers draw upon this reservoir as they act.

Adaptive. Improvisation that has no direction whatsoever will hold some interest for us later, but such aimless riffing (even the free associations of surrealism) eventually seek to fit (adapt) an organism to an environment, a structure to a function, a part to a whole. Even the most wandering free play of thought or gesture can be an exploration of the potential in a given material or scenario. Improvisation is often a research mechanism or method of adapting means to ends. In the 1920s, psychologists demonstrated how chimpanzees could stack boxes together and build poles to reach food.¹ Since then we’ve had countless studies revealing the engineering improvisations of primates and other mammals. Of course, humans are masters of repurposing materials to new functions—turning reading glasses into fire starters, dental floss into fishing line, and duct tape into everything else. The improviser’s survival may not be at stake in all these cases of adaptation, but we can appreciate that good improv improves the organism or has that potential.

Resource deficiency is often a key feature of improvisation. The perfectly provisioned kitchen or toolshed has an implement for every eventuality. Perusing posh shopping magazines introduces one to devices like the Grillbot Automatic Grill Cleaner robot and the Rosle Egg Cracker tool as well as the Parmesan cheese gouger. In this exclusive world, there is a preset tool and solution for every problem, but this is not the domain of the improviser. The improviser does not have the optimal resources needed for a given problem. And this paucity of resources is the very condition of creativity because it forces a kind of lateral thinking. From the survivalist who conquers the jungle with just the contents of his pockets, to the urban entrepreneur who entertains crowds of tourists with a bucket instead of a drum kit, the improvisers are usually short on supplies.

Various junkyard war competitions help students learn about design and engineering, by posing objectives (e.g., make a floating vessel) and then